Remember to Market Your Marketing

This was one of the post insightful things that I heard at the #SIMEngage conference last week (I think it was from Mark Homer).

When you consider your social marketing strategy, you (hopefully) are creating content. Content ranges from low investment to high investment — for example a Tweet probably takes a few minutes, and would generally be considered low investment. An info graphic may be medium investment to high investment. An e-book is definitely high investment. A blog post could be medium to high, depending on the post.

For your high investment or highly rated content, you want to make sure that you have a plan to market your marketing.

At Boot Camp Digital we have a content repurposing map that outlines when and how we promote and repromote our best and highest investment content (ideally our highest investment content is also our best, but not always).

Step 1: Evaluate Which Content is Worth Promoting

Evaluate which content deserves to be marketed; generally your highest investment content should be most worth promoting.

Step 2: Build a Promotion Map

Determine when, where and how you will promote your content. When you initially launch your content, you should have a clear plan to promote it. This should include PAID sources, EARNED sources and OWNED sources and all of these should be planned – don’t just rely on luck or “vitality” to support your content.

Step 3: Evaluate the Content

If you promote the content and it falls flat, you may have missed the mark. Evaluate if the content was actually useful and is generating shares and re-shares.

Step 4: Repromote Your Content

If you have great content, don’t just market it once — remarket it again and again (without being annoying). Most people don’t catch everything that you post. For example, a great infographic can probably be turned into 3 different blog posts, spaced 3 months apart. This way we maximize the number of people who see the infographic with each post focusing on a different part of the infographic. We can also repromote on Facebook and Twitter over time, as long as the content isn’t time oriented and won’t seem stale. We have a repromotion map that outlines when we will repromote each piece of content to maximize it.

Again, when you create great content (marketing) don’t forget to market it. If you build it they won’t come.